Paste as Plain Text In Any App With Puretext, A Free Portable Windows App

There are a number of situations that you might want to paste as plain text, i.e. with all formatting removed.

Lots of copy and pasting from the web results in formatted text. This is fine if you are only pasting into a search box, URL bar or Notepad, but if you are putting this into Evernote, Word, Powerpoint or other rich text aware applications, you don’t always want to keep the source formatting.

Copying numbers between Excel sheets or documents often brings with it formatting unless you move to the mouse or do the more complicated shortcuts for pasting plain text.

There are of course other situations that it would be helpful for applications to paste as plain text, especially where they themselves don’t offer the option.

Puretext provides the answer to this, sitting somewhere between the clipboard and the destination program, stripping formatting out on the fly. It’s as customisable as you need, it’s portable, tiny, and allows you to use WIN+V to paste as plain text in any Windows application. I’ve got it in Dropbox and shortcuts in Startup on all my Windows machines, because I use it all the time. Strongly recommended if you want to strip out formatting with a minimum of fuss or obstruction to your workflow.